Author: Dale Moore

If you are a returning visitor to our blog, you probably have a good idea of how important an online presence is in today’s digitally driven world. This post is going to show you just how easy it is to keep up with today’s technical society by building your own website using Weebly.com.

Based in San Francisco, CA, Weebly was founded in 2007 to help people create a unique website, blog or online store. Since its launch, Weebly has helped millions of people showcase their achievements, sell products for their business and communicate with online visitors around the world. The main purpose is to help people create a professional site without a need for technical experience. Weebly now has over 30 million registered users. For more on the history of Weebly, visit https://www.weebly.com/about

What To Do First

Signing up is free and easy. Just go to Weebly.com/signup and create a free account using your Google Plus, Facebook account or email address. Once you are logged in, you will be taken to a page where you can choose one of 40 themes categorized by featured, business, online store, personal, events, blog and portfolio. Each theme can include an online store or blog, and they can also be edited to your taste using Weebly’s drag and drop feature which allows you to place things right where you want them.

How It Works

You can then change the page layouts by choosing from over 40 layout designs from Weebly or by using the drag and drop function to create your own page layout from scratch. Transferring designs is easy because Weebly uses similar layouts with “zones”, you can change your layout without changing the position of your content as frequently as you’d like as long as your content is in the designated zones. You can also have as many pages as you’d like.

For the advanced users, Weebly also gives you the OPTION to access and edit code: HTML and CSS. This gives the user more flexibility with technical design, and you can also import code into a separate hosting service.

Weebly offers technical support, email updates and a user friendly mobile editor that will show you how you can make your website mobile friendly. Prices are listed below with a minimum purchase of a 6 month subscription.

https://www.weebly.com/pricing

Visit next week’s blog for information on website building using Wix.com.

It’s been a while since we’ve updated our blog! But there’s been a lot going on. Here’s a small sampling of some of the things that have happened since our last update. We’ll have more soon, including robotics, IMPACT2, Distance Education, and more! For up-to-the-minute information, check us out on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

Apps

We continue to expand our app offerings available for Extension professionals and clientele. For a list of our current iOS apps, visit http://techoutreach.msucares.com/apps. We’re also excited to announce we will have more Android apps soon!

Web Outreach

Our web outreach team, lead by Sarah Pittman, continues to roll out introductory websites for communities and organizations in need of their first web presence. There are many underserved organizations and governments in our state without a web presence at all, and we’re working to get everyone online! Here’s a small sampling of sites that have gone live:

Things have been pretty quiet here on the CTO blog the past few months, but we’re constantly working on new developments! The Center for Technology Outreach has been hard at work the past few months developing a new broadband app and website to help Mississippians find access to broadband Internet. With a focus on initiatives from expanding telehealth capability, e-commerce utilization, early years coding education, and more, the ConnectMS project is the springboard for all of it—and you can check it all out at connectmississippi.org!

Our world is more connected today than ever before. The Web can be accessed from all types of different devices, with even more yet to be imagined. Yesterday was the Internet of Things Day, a day dedicated to the advancing trend of the Internet (and, by extension, the World Wide Web) being accessible and integrated into our everyday world. While mobile apps may be the “in” thing right now, the Web has been around for far longer, and isn’t limited to the walled gardens of Apple, Google, Microsoft, and so on. The Web was designed to be device-agnostic, viewable on as many devices, and as many screen dimensions, as possible.

What makes this possible today? The answer: Responsive Web Design.

What is Responsive Web Design?

Responsive web design (RWD) is an approach to web design aimed at crafting sites to provide an optimal viewing experience—easy reading and navigation with a minimum of resizing, panning, and scrolling—across a wide range of devices (from desktop computer monitors to mobile phones).

Flexible images (images that expand or are replaced based on the viewport, for example)

Media queries (code that manipulates the elements on the screen, allowing for the two above things)

While I’ve already probably become too technical for the average reader, know this: if you want to have a website for your organization, then by default you should seek out someone who can build it for you using the elements of Responsive Web Design. If your website can’t adapt to the device that your customers are accessing it on, and things appear broken, the site won’t load, and so on, that is going to cost you customers and money due to a frustrating user experience. Your typical customer, citizen, user, or whomever your website’s market caters to is going to be viewing your website on a variety of different media—some on desktop computers with gigabit Internet, others on a several years old iPhone 4 with spotty 3G. While you can’t control all of the experience for your audience when it comes to your online presence, you can control how your site is built.

And the only solution that can cover all of your bases is to make sure your website utilizes Responsive Web Design.

To be continued…

Stay tuned for the next part of the Responsive Web Design series, where I will go into more detail on ways you can make sure your site can best reach your audience.

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